


My Fingers Ran with Blood

by yet_intrepid



Series: oh rise with me forever [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Amputation, Anakin's Prosthetic Hand, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Pre-Het, Pre-Revolution, Shmi Skywalker Swearing, Slavery, Tatooine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:15:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4500372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anakin remembers the knife in his hands and the chip so close to sliding out and the face turned towards him. Remembers and tries to bring up his hands to wipe at his face, because someone exploded right there beside him, but then the pain flashes and he’s yelling again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Fingers Ran with Blood

“Be still,” Padmé is saying, and her hands on his shoulders are like heated clamps. “Ani! You have to be still!”

She’s too close and she’s too far and he can’t breathe. He pushes up, gasping, shivering against the white-hot thrum that surrounds him.

“Padmé, hold him,” says another voice, and he knows it, it’s Mom. He tries to lift his hand and cling to her, because he can’t see her face, can’t see anything really. It’s blurry and dark. But when he moves his arm the world pitches and tilts and his stomach turns with pain.

He’s yelling, probably. He doesn’t know for sure.

“Ani!” Padmé again. “Anakin, shhh, it’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

He tries to nod. Tries to swallow. But when he breathes in, he smells it. Something burned.

And he remembers, remembers the knife in his hands and the chip so close to sliding out and the face turned towards him. Remembers and tries to bring up his hands to wipe at his face, because someone exploded right there beside him, but then the pain flashes and he’s yelling again.

For a second his vision is clear with agony. He sees Mom nod.

And then it gets worse, gets so much worse, and he clings and fights and holds to Padmé’s voice (“Ani, Ani, you’re okay”) and then he slips into the darkness.

\----

“What was his name?”

Shmi comes to a halt, resting her hand on Anakin’s shoulder. “What?”

“The one we rescued.” Anakin starts to wrap his arms around his knees as he stares out at the setting suns, then stops, staring down at the bandaged stump instead. “The one that blew up.”

Shmi’s eyes fall closed a moment and she breathes in strength. Then she sits down beside her son, rubbing his back. “I don’t know, Ani.”

“Oh.” Anakin shuts his eyes in turn, and when he opens them Shmi sees unshed tears. “Did I do it, Mom? Did I trigger the chip?”

And she wants to lie. She wants to tell him there was no way the explosion could’ve been set off by the surgery. But in a world like this, a lie is no protection, no kindness.

“I don’t know,” she says again. “I’ve never seen one that could be set off by contact, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Most likely, his master just picked that moment to force-detonate from the transmitter. But look at me, Anakin.”

Anakin turns slowly, and she takes his face in her hands. “You didn’t kill him,” she says. “No matter how the chip detonated. You were trying to save him, and the blame isn’t yours.”

He crumples into her, hiding in her shoulder, as she whispers to him that he is brave and good.

\----

“No, Mom, look. These two fingers still don’t move independently.”

Padmé comes up to the doorway, peeking in. Anakin and Shmi are bent over the half-built mechanical hand on the table, like they are every spare moment lately.

Padmé smiles. Anakin spent days after the loss of his hand trying to shut himself up alone, more brooding than grieving. But they brought him out to say Severance over the man who died, and that’s when Shmi raised the possibility of a prosthetic. She’d worked with them once, after all. It was repairing, not building, but together, she told him, they could do it.

And they have. They’re almost done.

“See?” Anakin fidgets with the prosthetic again. The middle finger and the pinky both extend. “Still linked.”

Shmi laughs. “I’m not sure you need independent motion there, kiddo.”

“Mom!” He waves his left hand. “I’ve still got this one, you know.”

She raises her eyebrows. Pokes him in his ticklish spot and watches him squirm.

Padmé bursts out laughing.

“Padmé!” Anakin complains.

She flips him off.

“Mom!”

Padmé looks as innocent as possible as Shmi turns around, but Shmi just grins.

“When you’re nineteen like Padmé,” she says, “I’ll give you free reign over your middle finger.”

 He sticks out his tongue instead and grabs at the mechanical hand on the table, fumbling at the crossed wires that restrict the fingers. But his left hand is clumsy and the prosthetic slides around. In moments, Padmé sees the shift. Anakin isn’t faking annoyance anymore; he’s really frustrated.

“Here,” she says, gently, and she reaches out to steady him. “Tell me how to help.”

Shmi, too, comes back to the table, and their five hands work together over the sixth until the middle finger finally works free.

Anakin looks up. “That’s for the slavers who put in that blasted chip in the first place,” he says. “The ones who killed the guy we tried to save.”

“And the ones who hurt you,” Padmé puts in.

Shmi looks Anakin in the eye. “Fuck them,” she says.

\----

When he first gets the prosthetic attached, he can’t stop moving. It’s so good, just to have two hands again. He cooks and he builds and he rubs the knots out of his cramped-up left hand, grown strong but awkward in the length of time he’s had no other to use. He likes to watch his new fingers bend and his new wrist turn, and he even likes the soft metallic sounds when he makes a fist. He has two hands and it’s good. It’s good.

But then Padmé comes up behind him, smiling, and she says, “Ani, can’t you be still for one second?” and he freezes, because the last time she told him to be still his hand, his real hand, came off. For a second, he can’t breathe, and he remembers the white-hot thrumming that came with the pain.

But she takes his hand (his metal hand) and she takes him to the doorstep to watch the setting suns. “Slow down,” she tells him, gently. “It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t,” he says. He’s desperate, wild. “I don’t want—”

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

He wraps the metal fingers tighter around her hand. Tries to feel like they’re part of him. Tries to tell himself that a part of his soul didn’t explode with the chip, with his hand, with the man whose name he’ll never know.

“I feel,” he says, and then he stops. She waits for him as the suns turn the desert red, but he can’t say anything else. Can’t even look at her. The world is thrumming and everything seems drenched in blood.

“I know,” she says at last. “But you’re okay, Ani. You’ll be okay.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [My Fingers Ran with Blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9287063) by [vinrebelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinrebelle/pseuds/vinrebelle)




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